My name is Ben, I'm a TA at the University of Arizona, I love puns and I'm Mormon.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

The Case of the Missing Wallet

On Saturday as I was leaving my house to head over to a pizza party I went into my room to grab my wallet – it wasn’t there! I then checked the living room, the bathroom, the kitchen, and finally my car. It wasn’t in any of those places. I was completely bum-puzzled (a made-up word that I heard someone use on Survivor that I have now started using) because there are only a few places that I ever leave my wallet and it wasn’t in any of those places. I was going to be late to the party so left my house feeling rather uneasy without my wallet.

When I got home I searched all the places that I thought my wallet could be again and then I searched a bunch of random places. The most confusing thing was that the only place I’d been that day was the gym and I remembered taking my wallet to the gym. I keep my gym membership card in my car and when I get to the gym I put the card in my pocket and my wallet where the card was so that I don’t have to deal with my wallet in the gym. My gym card was where it was supposed to be in my car so I assumed that I would have put my wallet back in my pocket when I returned my gym card to its proper place. But still, my wallet wasn’t in my house so I called the gym to see if they had found a wallet. Nothing.

On Sunday I called the gym again and they still hadn’t found my wallet so I rechecked everywhere in my house one more time. I even checked the refrigerator just in case I had put it there in an extreme moment of absentmindedness. Nope, just milk in there. I drove to the gym and checked the parking lot and the bushes to see if I had dropped it on accident. Nada. I was now extremely bum-puzzled.

On Monday I decided to put the parable of the lost coin into practice. In the parable a woman loses a coin and then cleans up her house as she looks for it. In the end not only does she find the lost coin, but she now has a clean house. She’s so thrilled to have found the coin that she throws a party. I cleaned my entire house and didn’t find it. My house looked a lot nicer, but I still had no wallet.

At this point I started to get really worried. Friends had recommended that I cancel my credit cards right away, but I hadn’t because I was sure that my wallet was somewhere in my house. Now I wasn’t sure what to think and I started to think about all the things in my wallet that would be a pain to replace (debit card, credit card, drivers license, insurance card, temple recommend, and a nearly completed Café Rio stamp card that I was going to use on my next trip to Utah).

When I got home from FHE on Monday night I decided to check the bushes by my driveway to see if I’d accidentally dropped it there. It was dark so I took out my flashlight and scanned the area around my driveway, but nothing. My landlady’s car is parked in the garage and I had previously looked under it for my wallet, but not with a flashlight so I decided to check again. As I walked towards the car I saw my wallet in the garage lying on the ground next to an old hose. I was shocked and elated, but I was also rather bum-puzzled. You see, not only had I already searched the garage, but I had walked by my wallet about a dozen times without noticing it and it wasn’t very hidden at all. In fact, it was kind of out in the open. How could I have missed it? Here’s my sinister theory.

For the last few weeks a man has been rebuilding the deck at my house. We’ve chatted a bunch and formed a nice, casual friendship. He really likes to tease me about my Mormonism. He calls me a jack Mormon and often asks how many girls I had over the previous night. I’ll say eight and then he’ll laugh and I’ll pretend to laugh at my unwitty response. He had been at my house for hours the day my wallet disappeared and I even mentioned to him that I couldn’t find my wallet as I was leaving for the pizza party. His response was, “I hope there wasn’t too much money in it,” and I responded, “Don’t worry, I’m a teacher.” He didn’t come over on Sunday, but he did come over again on Monday afternoon. My sinister theory is that he snatched my wallet off the kitchen table, felt guilty, and returned it to a place where he knew I’d find it.

Is it possible that this jovial deck builder stole my wallet? Maybe. Is it likely? Probably not. It seems much more likely that I dropped it in the garage and somehow didn’t manage to see it for three days. And I can’t be too suspicious of him because he was nice enough to patch the hole in the wall that my dad made. It appears that the case of the missing wallet has been solved and the culprit is my clumsy hands and under observant eyes.